Biotechnology has emerged as an essential tool in efforts to meet the challenge of increasing global demand for food production. Conventional approaches to improving agricultural productivity, e.g. enhanced yield or engineered pest resistance, rely on either mutation breeding or introduction of novel genes into the genomes of crop species by transformation. Both processes are inherently nonspecific and relatively inefficient. For example, conventional plant transformation methods deliver exogenous DNA that integrates into the genome at random locations. Thus, in order to identify and isolate transgenic lines with desirable attributes, it is necessary to generate thousands of unique random-integration events and subsequently screen for the desired individuals. As a result, conventional plant trait engineering is a laborious, time-consuming, and unpredictable undertaking. Furthermore the random nature of these integrations makes it difficult to predict whether pleiotropic effects due to unintended genome disruption have occurred. As a result, the generation, isolation and characterization of plant lines with engineered genes or traits has been an extremely labor and cost-intensive process with a low probability of success.
Targeted gene modification overcomes the logistical challenges of conventional practices in plant systems, and as such has been a long-standing but elusive goal in both basic plant biology research and agricultural biotechnology. However, with the exception of “gene targeting” via positive-negative drug selection in rice or the use of pre-engineered restriction sites, targeted genome modification in all plant species, both model and crop, has until recently proven very difficult. Terada et al. (2002) Nat Biotechnol 20(10):1030; Terada et al. (2007) Plant Physiol 144(2):846; D'Halluin et al. (2008) Plant Biotechnology J. 6(1):93.
Recently, methods and compositions for targeted cleavage of genomic DNA have been described. Such targeted cleavage events can be used, for example, to induce targeted mutagenesis, induce targeted deletions of cellular DNA sequences, and facilitate targeted recombination at a predetermined chromosomal locus. See, for example, United States Patent Publications 20030232410; 20050208489; 20050026157; 20050064474; and 20060188987, and International Publication WO 2007/014275, the disclosures of which are incorporated by reference in their entireties for all purposes. U.S. Patent Publication No. 20080182332 describes use of non-canonical zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) for targeted modification of plant genomes and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/284,888 describes ZFN-mediated targeted integration into a plant EPSPS locus.
However, there remain needs for compositions and methods for stable targeted integration into additional loci within a plant genome for establishing stable, heritable genetic modifications in the plant and its progeny.